Cardin Fashions a Legacy in Venice That Doesn't Float With the Locals

At 90, He Wants to Spend His Fortune on a Monument Many Italians Can't Abide

ENLARGE

Pierre Cardin, 90, hopes to spend his fortune to build the Palais Lumière.
Charlotte Gonzalez for The Wall Street Journal

By

Gabriele Parussini

Updated Nov. 23, 2012 7:50 a.m. ET

VENICE, Italy—At 90, with no children and no designated heir, legendary French fashion designer Pierre Cardin wants to plow his entire fortune into one last pet project: planting an 840-foot tower across the lagoon from the historical center of the City of Canals.

Mr. Cardin says nothing else thrills him as much as the €1.5 billion ($1.93 billion) construction plan—a building that would both outlive him and eclipse Venice's main bell tower as the lagoon's beacon.

Born near Venice, Mr. Cardin moved to a provincial French city with his parents when he was two. He made his way to Paris, was a pioneer in bringing high fashion to the masses, and spent time in China during the Cold War. He turned his name into a global brand, attaching it to a slew of businesses, from cigarettes to leather belts and hotels. He even became one of the "immortals," as guardians of the French language at the French Academy are known.

"I've been top notch in fashion, I own several chateaux, boats, art," Mr. Cardin said Wednesday. "What else can I do?"

Many Venetians are horrified.

They say the skyscraper, a pile of six horizontal Frisbee-like discs caught in between three wavy pillars with apartments, hotels and offices, would simply ruin Venice both for locals and the 22 million tourists who come here every year.

ENLARGE

The Palais Lumière

"The project, the location, everything: it's the stupidest thing one could imagine," said Vittorio Gregotti, the last architect who was authorized to build new housing visible from the historical part of Venice, in the 1980s. "If Mr. Cardin needs a mausoleum so badly, I'm sure we can find a good-hearted mayor somewhere who'll build an equestrian statue of him in a square."

Another Venetian architect,
Cristiano Gasparetto,
is trying to form an international coalition against Mr. Cardin's plan by enlisting Unesco. The United Nations agency for culture and science includes Venice on its World Heritage List, a record of sites that deserve international protection, since 1987.

At Unesco's head office in Paris, Mr. Gasparetto's call for help hit home. The technocrat in charge of culture,
Francesco Bandarin,
is a Venetian.

"What does a giant spaceship have to do with Venice?" Mr. Bandarin said.

Mr. Bandarin said he has written a letter to Italy's Culture Ministry asking for more information about the project. If the tower is built, he said, the city could be dropped from the World Heritage List. An Italian diplomat in Paris confirmed that the letter has been received by the Culture Ministry in Rome, and that a response should come shortly.

Invisible parts of the proposed building, its deep foundations, are also a concern. Venetians fear that underground pillars will pierce through the aquifer and disrupt the delicate balance that keeps the city afloat, increasing the frequency of tides that submerge the old center during the cold season—a phenomenon known as acqua alta, or high waters.

Since the 1920s, factories and chemical plants have cropped up on the mainland town of Porto Marghera, which is part of Venice's municipality, and pumped water from underground water tables. Environmental activists say this has accelerated the sinking of the old part of the city, which stands on wood pillars and sagged by 3.5 inches in the past 40 years.

Venetians watch the tide anxiously.

"Thank you, Signor Pietro Cardin!" said Mr. Gasparetto, the architect. "You are about to turn Venice into a submarine attraction."

At his Paris office overlooking the Élysée Palace, Mr. Cardin said he has no time to deal with detractors of his tower project, called the Palais Lumière, or Palace of Light.

He has found some supporters and says construction could start early next year.

Once a mighty republic that controlled shipping routes across the Mediterranean Sea, Venice is caught in the same economic doldrums as the rest of recession-hit Italy. Some local politicians say it is hard to turn down Mr. Cardin and a construction project that would help create as many as 5,000 jobs. The city, which owns some of the land where the Palace of Light would be built, is on a tight budget. It has just announced that municipal police will not get new uniforms this year.

"Selling the land to Mr. Cardin is in our interest," Venice Mayor Giorgio Orsoni said.

The transaction could bring in as much as €30 million to city coffers, and urban development taxes could reach €80 million, according to city officials.

Mr. Cardin, who would finance the entire project himself said he was ready to pay some of that money up front, but only into an escrow account to make sure the city does not cash his check before he has a valid construction permit in hand.

First presented in 2010, Mr. Cardin's skyscraper has reached the last stages of the approval procedure. Local officials have yet to meet with representatives of the port and airport authorities to give the project the green light. This could happen in the coming weeks, city officials said.

Opponents of Mr. Cardin, like Mr. Gasparetto, the Venetian architect, say they have not lost hope the tower will join a long list of gargantuan projects that got stuck in Venice's marshy waters, like the sublagunare, a subway plan that was first proposed in the 1980s but never constructed.

To finance the Venice tower investment, Mr. Cardin said he would use most of his personal assets as collateral for loans. The long list of properties includes the Château de Lacoste in southern France, once the home of the Marquis de Sade.

Also for sale is the designer's eponymous label, which some analysts have valued at roughly €200 million, far below his asking price of €1 billion.

Mr. Cardin's grandiose tower project—the Palace of Light would be Italy's tallest building—began with a small vase.

Rodrigo Basilicati, an Italian relative of Mr. Cardin's who is in charge of the company's furniture business and was responsible for the technical design of the tower, said inspiration came one afternoon in 2007. Mr. Cardin, he recalled, was sketching three flowers in a vase for another piece of furniture. As the day went by, the sketch became a 100-foot-high monument to adorn a square.

Over dinner, Mr. Cardin asked: "Why don't we have people living in it?"

Mr. Basilicati, a construction engineer by training, went on to develop the project. He said the building will be equipped with a system that extracts heat from the ground as well as wind turbines to make the tower self-sufficient in electricity. Inside, rooms will be fitted with furniture from Mr. Cardin's company.

Despite the innovative features and signature decoration, Mr. Cardin, who owns a house in the historical part of Venice, said he does not plan to move into the tower.

"I'll keep my palace in Venice," he said. "At the Palace of Light, I'll make do with a tiny studio."

Although he has yet to lay the first stone of his Venice tower, Mr. Cardin is already thinking of replicating the building in other places around the world. He had thought of erecting his Palace of Light in the City of Lights but faced resistance from Paris's authorities.

After all, Mr. Cardin said, building a skyscraper in Paris almost as tall as the Eiffel Tower "would have been an act of immoderate pretension."

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.